Daybreak: Obama Failing on Iran, Israel, Guns

• An all-star group of foreign policy thinkers from President Obama’s first-term team, including Thomas Pickering and Anne-Marie Slaughter, has issued a damning report of the White House’s Iran policy, warning that the sanctions-and-diplomacy strategy may be solidifying the Islamic Republic’s drive for nuclear weapons rather than discouraging it. [NYT]

• Obama’s new Secretary of State, John Kerry, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee at a hearing Wednesday that the president’s efforts to referee between the Israelis and the Palestinians hasn’t fared much better. “I believe the window for a two-state solution is shutting,” Kerry said. “I think we have some period of time: a year, a year and a half to two years—or it’s over.” [Politico]

• After months of debate in the wake of the Newtown shootings last winter, the Senate killed any new gun control legislation. Obama, at the White House, called the failure of reform “pretty shameful,” but former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords channeled the righteous outrage of many with a scathing op-ed in the New York Times. “Senators say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby,” she writes. “But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the first the first-graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt.” [NYT]

• Thanks to an effort by Berlin’s central library to maintain an online catalogue of books seized from Jews by the Nazis, Peter Schweitzer, the leader of New York’s City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, has now recovered an Alpine club periodical that once belonged to his great-grandfather. [Atlantic]

• Matt Weinstock has now invoked Cynthia Ozick – whose 85th birthday was yesterday – to explain Justin Bieber’s hope that Anne Frank would have been a fan. [TNY]

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I hate to say it but Allison Hoffman is a dismal writer for an increasingly dismal journal.

Must Tablet stock its stable with infantile authors who cannot see beyond their own culturally scripted viewpoints?

Some of us are 100% Pro-Israel without becoming 100% Anti-Everyone Else (including President Obama).

A good course in journalism and journalistic ethics might serve her well.

However, I doubt that Ms. Hoffman comprehends that the classical journalistic questions designed to elicit facts and objectivity – ‘What, Where, Why, Who, When, How’ – apply to Jewish and Israeli questions as well as they do to non-Jewish or Israeli questions.

Sorry, Tablet, but your brand of journalism doesn’t cut it with religiously observant, pro-Israeli Jews like me who actually know what good journalism requires.

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